[redirecting to the mailing list] On 12/31/06, Michael T. Richter wrote:

On Sat, 2006-30-12 at 23:48 -0800, Kirsten Chevalier wrote:

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I'm probably not the right person to explain why David Roundy chose to write his code the way he did, since I've never even met him. However, since as of 12/8/2006 there were 115 contributors to darcs, perhaps reading the source code isn't as difficult as you seem to think it is.

What's the secret then? pdflatex vomits. unlit generates a few dozen pages of whitespace per five-line block of code. I'm at a loss to take this "literate" format and turn it into something which I can read.

The secret lies in adjusting your perspective. The literate format is readable by humans as is. If there are specific things about it that you find difficult, you can post about them here with *specific* examples you find perplexing. But one reason why you may feel like people aren't being helpful is that your question isn't specific enough.

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I fail to see how making code which can't be read makes it more... readable.

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"Can't" is an awfully strong word, isn't it?

Nope. The source files as they are are gibberish.

Again, that's an awfully strong statement. Clearly, there exist any number of people who can read them without finding them gibberish. Perhaps it might be better to listen to what they are telling you than to make contradictory declarations.

There's some kind of markup (of a type I can't identify) mixed up with Haskell source. Given that I can't identify the markup and I'm a little hazy on Haskell at this point (part of the point of this exercise was to learn to read Haskell as it's used in real projects), the net effect is executable line noise. You know, like a perl program written circa 3.0.

Right, if you're trying to learn to read Haskell as it's used in real projects, reading the .lhs files as they are is the way to go. Again, if you find specific things hard to comprehend, ask here, or on the IRC channel. A general "all Haskell looks like line noise!" complaint is hard for us to answer.

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I can only explain how I did it myself, which was through practice.

OK. How do you read the literate source code? Which tools do you use to separate the code from the commentary? Which tools actually work to turn .lhs files into something human-readable? (pdflatex failed on the GHC code as well.)

My eyes. And brain. I'm sorry that I can't be more helpful, but that's what most other people I've watched reading Haskell code use, too. Cheers, Kirsten -- Kirsten Chevalier* chevalier@alum.wellesley.edu *Often in error, never in doubt "Memo to myself: Do the dumb things I gotta do. Touch the puppet head." -- They Might Be Giants